We’ve talked a lot about quadcopters used as flying bombs, but turns out they’re pretty helpful for diffusing them, too.
Under a “multi-million dollar” contract, the Air Force’s elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) units are getting their hands on Skydio’s fan favorite X10D Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) small-UAS, the company exclusively revealed to Tectonic this morning.
The contract covers “hundreds” of the drones, which “more than doubles” the scope of the initial contract the Air Force inked with the California-based startup last November, Skydio said, though the company couldn’t disclose the exact figures.
Big buzz: Skydio—which raised a $110M Series F at an eye-watering $4.4B valuation last month—is a known quantity in the drone game. Since launching in 2014, Skydio has become the largest drone manufacturer in the US, delivering over 60,000 of its drones to more than 3,800 customers, including every branch of the US military, over 1,200 US public safety agencies, and 29 allied nations, putting its annual revenue in the hundreds of millions.
Their X10D quadcopter has become a particularly hot commodity, especially with the US military:
- The drone has a top speed of 45mph, a sub-40-second deployment time, and can fly in jammed environments using onboard AI and six navigation cameras with 360-degree visibility that map terrain in real time.
- Back in March, the Army awarded Skydio the largest single-vendor small-UAS order, snapping up 2,500 of the drones for a cool $52M.
- Before that, the X10D was tapped for the Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) Program of Record in 2022, with a base-year value of $20.2M and a five-year production OTA of nearly $100M, and selected it for Tranche 2 of the program last year.
- Skydio also snagged a $9M+ order from US Air Forces Central (USAFCENT) to deploy its Skydio Dock and X10D drone to US airbases in the Middle East last month.
The sensors on the X10D are especially helpful for EOD units, where precision is obviously pretty dang important. On top of the 48MP camera, “Our forward-looking FLIR infrared sensor can detect things that are underground, just because the temperature changes, and that’s a game changer for them,” Skydio’s Global Head of National Security Strategy, Mark Valentine, told Tectonic.
Easy peasy: Another reason the Air Force’s EOD units wanted to get their hands on the X10D is that it’s “almost as easy to use as an iPhone—they just take it out of the box and start using it,” Valentine said, and the obstacle avoidance technology “reduces the cognitive load on the operator, so they can focus on the mission and not actual flying.”
“EOD [units] spend all their time training to diffuse unexploded ordnance and don’t really have time to learn how to be great pilots,” he said. “We can abstract all those hard skills away from them so they can use their gray matter to diffuse bombs, and that’s why you’re seeing this uptick in usage in places where you traditionally haven’t seen small-UAS.”
Letting the bomb squads focus on bombs seems like a pretty solid idea to us.